James Henry Gatling, a Hertford County native, began a life-long
fascination with flight by observing birds and building kites as a child. He
experimented with wings made of hay and once, to the amusement of his neighbors,
jumped from a barn loft holding an umbrella. The older brother of Richard J.
Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, Henry was himself an industrious and creative
man. In addition to inventing a cotton stalk chopper and a wood-preserving method,
Gatling was a farmer, hunter, fisherman, miller, and winemaker.

Gatling finished building North Carolina's first airplane in 1873. Twin wooden
propellers were powered by cranking a handwheel, and more cockpit levers
operated the front
elevator
,
vertical rudder
, and wings. Using poplar and
thin pieces of oak, Gatling built a
fuselage
and wings light enough to be
sustained by muscle power alone. Gatling supposed that once his plane was
airborne, the machine wouldn't require as much of his energy.

vertical rudder

A hinged airfoil mounted at the tail of an aircraft and used to make horizontal course changes.

fuselage

The central body of an aircraft.

elevator

A movable control surface, usually attached to the horizontal stabilizer of an aircraft, that is used to produce motion up or down.

While concerned for the plane's weight, Gatling's design overlooked the wingspan.
The craft was eighteen-feet long with a wingspan of only fourteen feet, not enough
for successful flight. Gatling planned to fly the craft from atop a twelve-foot
high platform on his gin mill to a road a mile away, now Highway 258. On a Sunday
afternoon in 1873, his farmhands pushed him off the platform while Gatling cranked
the handwheel. The plane was aloft only a short distance before Gatling crashed
into an elm tree at the edge of his yard. He received minor injuries, but never
flew again. His plane was destroyed in a fire in 1905.

In October 2001, carpentry students at Roanoke-Chowan Community College began
constructing a full-scale replica of the 1873 Gatling flyer. The airplane is
on display at the Agriculture and Transportation Museum in Historic Murfreesboro.